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Ethiopia demands urgent food for millions
TWENTY-five years after Ethiopia's famine killed a million people and spurred a massive global aid effort, the government has appealed for help for more than six million facing starvation.State Minister for Agriculture Mitiku Kassa said the country needed 159,000 tonnes of food aid worth $121 million between now and year's end for 6.2 million people. He said nearly 80,000 children under five were suffering from acute malnutrition and that $US9 million ($9.68 million) was required for moderately malnourished children and women. "Since... January, the country continues to face several humanitarian challenges in food and livelihood security, health, nutrition, and in water and sanitation," Mr Mitiku told donors. In a report to mark the 25th anniversary since the famine, Oxfam called for a change of strategy towards the human suffering in Ethiopia, Africa's second most populous country after Nigeria. It urged donors to focus on helping communities devise ways of preparing and dealing with disasters such as building dams to collect rain water to be used during dry seasons rather that sending emergency relief. The long-term strategies receive less than one per cent of international aid, Oxfam said. "Sending food aid does save lives, the dominance of this approach fails to offer long-term solutions which would break these cyclical and chronic crises," stated the report: Band Aids and Beyond. "We cannot make the rains come, but there is much more that we can do to break the cycle of drought-driven disaster in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa," Oxfam director Penny Laurence said. "Food aid offers temporary relief and has kept people alive in countless situations, but does not tackle the underlying causes that continue to make people vulnerable to disaster year-after-year." Of $US3.2 billion ($3.44 billion) of US aid to Ethiopia since 1991, 94 per cent is food which is delivered there rather than grown locally or imported from the region, said the aid group. Posted by: tipper 2009-10-22 |
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